Recent weeks have brought yet another sad chance to watch badly laid
plans in Afghanistan go haywire. In three separate incidents, allies,
most from the Afghan National Army (ANA), allegedly murdered six Americans
-- two of them officers in the high-security sanctum of Kabul’s
Interior Ministry. Marine General John R. Allen, commander of U.S. and
NATO forces in Afghanistan, even briefly withdrew NATO advisors and trainers from all government ministries for their own protection.

Until that moment, the Afghan National Army was the crown jewel of
the Obama administration’s strategy for drawing down forces in
Afghanistan (without really leaving). Trained
in their hundreds of thousands over the past 11 years by a horde of
dodgy private security contractors, as well as U.S. and NATO troops, the
Afghan National Army is supposed to replace coalition forces any day now and defend its own country.

This policy has been the apex of Washington’s Plan A for some time now. There is no Plan B.

But what to make of the murders in the Ministry?

Tomgram: Ann Jones, Playing the Game in Afghanistan

How primitive the Afghans are! A New York Times account of faltering negotiations over a possible “strategic partnership”
agreement to leave U.S. troops on bases in that country for years to
come highlights just how far the Afghans have to go to become, like
their U.S. mentor, a mature democracy. Take the dispute over prisons.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been insisting that the U.S. turn
over its prison facility at Bagram Air Base to his government. (The recently burned Korans
came from that prison’s library.) The Obama administration initially
refused and now has suggested a six-month timetable for such a turnover,
an option Karzai has, in turn, rejected. No one, by the way, seems yet to be negotiating about a second $36-million prison at Bagram that, TomDispatch recently reported, the U.S. is now in the process of building.

The Times’ Alissa Rubin suggests, however, that a major stumbling block remains to any such turnover. She writes:
“The challenges to a transfer are enormous, presenting serious
security risks both for the Afghan government and American troops. Many
of the estimated 3,200 people being detained [in Bagram’s prison]
cannot be tried under Afghan law because the evidence does not meet the
legal standards required to be admitted in Afghan courts. Therefore,
those people, including some suspected insurgents believed likely to
return to the fight if released, would probably have to be released
because Afghanistan has no law that allows for indefinite detention for
national security reasons.”

Honestly, what kind of a backward country doesn’t have a provision for the indefinite detention,
on suspicion alone, of prisoners without charges or hope of trial? As
a mature democracy, we now stand proudly for global indefinite
detention, not to speak of the democratic right to send robot assassins
to take out those suspected of evil deeds anywhere on Earth. As in any
mature democracy, the White House has now taken on many of the traits
of a legal system -- filling, that is, the roles of prosecutor, judge,
jury, and executioner.

Six months to learn all that (and how to burn Korans, too)? I don’t
think so. Or how about a really mature plan that, according to an Associated Press report,
top Pentagon officials are now mulling over: to put whatever U.S.
elite special operations forces remain in Afghanistan after 2014 under
CIA control. The reason? Once they are so lodged, even though their
missions wouldn’t change, they would officially become “spies” and
whoever’s running Washington then will be able to swear, with complete
candor, that no U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan. Even better, the CIA
is conveniently run by former Afghan War commander David Petraeus and
the U.S. public would no longer have to be informed about “funding or
operations” for those non-troops. Now, that’s how a mature democracy
makes the trains run on time!

An AP article headlined
“Acts of Afghan Betrayal Are Poisoning U.S. War Plan” detected “a trend
of Afghan treachery.” This “poisoning” is, however, nothing new.
Military lingo has already long defined assaults on American and NATO
soldiers by members of the Afghan National Security Force (a combination
of the ANA and the Afghan National Police) as “green on blue
incidents.” Since the military started recording them in May 2007, 76
NATO soldiers have been killed and an undisclosed number wounded in 46
recorded “deliberate attacks.”

These figures suggest more than a recent “trend of Afghan treachery”
(though Afghans are increasingly blamed for everything that goes wrong
in their country). Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who perversely
called the latest green on blue incidents signs of Taliban “weakness,” told
the press: “I’ve made clear and I will continue to make clear that,
regardless of what the enemy tries to do to us, we are not going to
alter our strategy in Afghanistan.”

This is, of course, the definition of paralysis in Afghanistan, so
much easier in the short term than reexamining Plan A. In other words,
as the American exercise in Afghanistan rolls ever closer to the full
belly-up position, Plan A remains rigidly in place, and signals that,
from Secretary Panetta and General Allen on down, Americans still don’t
seem to get what’s going on.

Beware an Afghan Army

Many people who know Afghanistan well, however, have warned from the
beginning against this plan to train up an armed force. I’m among the
naysayers, and I’ll tell you why.

First, consider what the plan proposes. The number of Afghan soldiers
and police to be trained varies widely from one report to the next, but
the last estimate I received directly from the Kabul Military Training
Center called for 240,000 soldiers and 160,000 police (who,
incidentally, are also called “soldiers” and trained in a similar
manner). That brings the total proposed Afghan National Security Force
(ANSF) to approximately four times the number of current coalition
troops in the country.

It costs the U.S. $12 billion annually to train the army alone and the estimated cost of maintaining it beyond 2014 is $4 billion
per year, of which the Afghan government says it can pay no more than
12%. Clearly, Afghanistan does not need and cannot sustain such a
security force. Instead, the United States will be stuck with the bill,
hoping for help from NATO allies -- until the force falls apart. How
then did this security force become the centerpiece of the Obama plan?
And given its obvious absurdity, why is it written in stone?

Second, take just a moment to do something Washington has long been
adverse to -- review a little basic Afghan history as it applies to Plan
A. Start with the simplest of all facts: in the country’s modern
history, no Afghan national army has ever saved a government, or even
tried. More often, such an army has either sat on its hands during a coup d’état or actually helped to overthrow the incumbent ruler.

Go back nearly a century to the reign of King Amanullah (1919-1929), a
modernizing ruler who wrote a constitution, established a national
assembly, founded girls' schools, taxed polygamous husbands, and banned
conservative mullahs from the country because they might be “bad and
evil persons” spreading treacherous foreign propaganda. In 1928, he
returned to Afghanistan with his Queen Suraya, who wore European dresses
and no veil, from a round of visits to European rulers, bringing guns
for his army (though his soldiers would be billed for them) and
announced a new agenda of revolutionary reforms. He got a revolution
instead, and here’s the important point: his newly weaponized army
lifted not a finger to save him.

Amanullah’s successor, an ex-bandit known as Bacha-i Saqqa, lasted
only eight months in office before his successor, Nadir Shah, had him
hanged, again without intervention from the Afghan army. Nadir Shah in
turn reigned from 1929 to 1933, and although he, like Barack Obama,
tried to build up the national army, that force of 40,000 men couldn’t
help him when he was assassinated by a schoolboy at a high school
graduation ceremony.

From 1933 to 1973, Nadir Shah’s son, Zahir Shah, presided over
gradual social progress. He introduced a new constitution, free
elections, a parliament, civil rights, women’s rights, and universal
suffrage. During his long peaceful reign, his professional
spit-and-polish army served him very well on ceremonial occasions. (This
is the same popular king who, after the Taliban fell, offered to return
and reunite the country; Bush turned him down.)

In 1973, when Zahir Shah went to Italy for medical care, his cousin
Daoud Khan -- a general, former Commander of the Central Forces, and
Minister of Defense -- abolished the monarchy and assumed power with the
aid of young communists in a bloodless coup. The army was in his
pocket, but five years later, in 1978, it fell apart and fought on both
sides as the communists overthrew and murdered Daoud. The fractured
army could not prevent the Soviet invasion, nor safeguard any of the
presidents in power before they came or after they left.

It’s worth remembering, too, that every one of these shifts in power
was followed by a purge of political enemies that sent thousands of
Afghans loyal to the jettisoned ruler to prison, death, or another
country in the prolonged exodus that has made the Afghan diaspora the
largest in the world drawn from a single country. That diaspora
continues today -- 30,000 Afghans fled last year and applied for asylum elsewhere -- and the next purge hasn’t even gotten underway yet.

In
short, Afghan history is a sobering antidote to the relentless optimism
of the American military. Modern Afghan history indicates that no
Afghan National Army of any size or set of skills has ever warded off a
single foreign enemy or done a lick of good for any Afghan ruler.

As for those Afghan guys who whipped the British three times and the
Soviet’s Red Army, they were mostly freelancers, attached to the
improvised militias of assorted warlords, fighting voluntarily against
invaders who had occupied their country. The Taliban, like the
mujahidin of the anti-Soviet struggle before them, seem to fight quite
successfully without any significant training, armor, or heavy equipment
to speak of, except what some Taliban snatch by signing up from time to
time for basic training with the ANA (or buy from ANA soldiers).

The Afghan National Game

Another objection to spending billions on training an Afghan National
Army is this: you never know whom they will shoot. The problem is not
the odd rogue soldier or Talib infiltrator. The problem is that the
Afghan moral code is different from ours, though still apparently
invisible to our military and political leaders.

Many years ago, an American Foreign Service officer in Afghanistan
fell in love with the place and went sort of rogue himself. Whitney
Azoy resigned to become an anthropologist and in 1982 published an enchanting scholarly book about the Afghan sport of buzkashi, in which mounted horsemen vie for possession of a dead goat or calf.

His book became a bible for visiting journalists who soon made a
cliché of the game, comparing the dead goat to the country of
Afghanistan, torn apart throughout its history by competing foreign
powers: England and Russia, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the U.S. and
Pakistan. Journalists compared the game to polo, apparently never having
seen a game of polo. Take my word for it: it is not like polo.
Anyway, that’s not the point.

What many missed is the bigger picture: that all the chapandazan
(horsemen) ride for a sponsor, who may be the wealthy landowning host
of the day’s competition, or perhaps another large landowner living some
distance away. Chapandazan compete not for the calf, but for
the favor of the sponsoring khan who will bestow upon the winners the
turban cloths that mark their public stature and the money that will
support their families. Here’s the point: if a sponsor fails in his
obligations -- if he loses the ability and wherewithal to honor,
protect, and support his chapandazan -- they will switch to the man who can.

In short, for their own safety and advancement, Afghans back a
winner, and if he goes into decline, they ditch him for a rising star.
To spot that winner is the mark of the intelligent survivor. To stick
loyally to a losing cause, as any patriotic American would do, seems to
an Afghan downright stupid.

Now, apply this to the ANA as American and NATO troops draw down in
2014. Any army intended to defend a nation must be loyal to the
political leaders governing the country. Estimates among Afghan experts
of how long the ANA would be loyal to Afghan President Hamid Karzai
start at two weeks, and remember, 2014 is a presidential election year,
with Karzai barred by the constitution from seeking another term. In
other words, Obama’s Plan A calls for urgently building up a national
army to defend a government that will not exist before our own combat
troops leave the country.

And if that election is riddled with fraud, as the last one was? Or
inconclusive? Or violently contested? Has President Obama or Secretary
of Defense Panetta or anyone else given any thought to that?

These days, as Afghan men, mostly in army and police uniforms, shoot
and kill NATO soldiers on a remarkably regular basis, the American
military still publicly writes off the deaths as “isolated incidents.”

But the isolation may be an American one. The connections among
Afghans are evident to anyone who cares to look. When I was at a
forward operating base with the U.S. Army
in Kunar province in 2010, for instance, Afghan soldiers were relegated
to an old base next door. Armed American soldiers guarded the gate in
between, and ANA leaders were shadowed everywhere by an armed U.S.
sergeant who tried unconvincingly to give the impression he was just out
for a stroll. What struck me most was this: while the Americans on
their base
recoiled under daily Taliban shelling, the Afghan watchman at the
nearby ANA post, perhaps privy to some additional information, slept
peacefully on a cot on the roof of his office with his teakettle by his
side. The military has long called this a “partnership.”

But now the numbers are adding up to something else entirely. While
some commentators speak of Afghan treachery and others detect a Taliban
plot to infiltrate the security forces, I suspect something quite
different. Malcolm Gladwell might call it a tipping point. What we are
watching unfold in Afghanistan is the desertion of chapandazan who have already found a new khans.

Security Force: An Oxymoron

All along, however, I’ve had a bigger objection to spending tens of
billions of dollars training a vast Afghan National Security Force. And
it couldn’t be more basic: armies and war are never good for women,
children, or civilians in general.

To redeem the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan and improve the
quality of life of its people, we should have invested early, under
Afghan guidance, in electricity, clean water, and sanitation. After two
decades of almost constant war and civil war, we should have demined the
precious fields in this agricultural country and supported Afghan
farmers and laborers as they tried to repair crucial bombed-out
irrigation systems. These measures were never jobs for the U.S.
military, but they might have won peace and saved soldiers’ lives in the
bargain. After all, soldiers have actually died by falling into broken
irrigation tunnels and wells, even more by treading on mines.

Note, too, that the expense of training and supporting soldiers to wage war is bad for both sides. The trillions
spent on our own forces and weapons systems is money we might have
spent to improve the quality of American lives. And keep in mind that
the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will not peak until
mid-century, so expensive is the lifelong aftercare of our own ruined
soldiers.

To keep the chapandazan, or the Afghan people and their
problematic army, on your side, you have to offer the symbols and
substance of normal life. But being Americans, we think that “national
security” means armies and night vision goggles and drones and
“strategic partnerships,” even with a reluctant, exhausted, angry, and
grief-stricken people.

To the normal world -- that is, the world not in thrall to American
militarism -- “national security” means something quite different. It
means all those big and little things that enable people to feel
relatively calm and cared for in their daily lives. That would be food,
water, shelter, jobs, health care, schools for the kids, domestic
police to keep the peace, and maybe even some firefighters -- all those
things we fail to attend to there, or increasingly here.

As things stand today, as International Women’s Day is celebrated around the world, women in Afghanistan contemplate the withdrawal of some American and NATO troops with both relief and fear.They fear the Taliban. They fear President Karzai's endorsement of new, Taliban-like (and unconstitutional) "guidelines"
for women that would confine them again. They fear the Afghan National
Army, the heroes of Plan A, and the countless thousands of deserters
who joined up to get a gun and went home.

Civilians live in dread of the legacy of the Obama strategy: the
presence of half a million gunmen on the loose, in search of a
sponsoring khan.